Holy Gaslighting

Sometimes, Heavenly Father likes to test our faith in complicated ways. We see this in the Bible, when Heavenly Father told Abraham to fully murder his son, Isaac, and then, at the very last second, when Isaac's already pretty traumatized because his dad's tied him up and is looming over him with a sharp knife, said, "Okay, never mind on the murder, I just wanted to make sure that you'd do whatever I tell you. And also that you love me more than you love your kid."

When your boyfriend or girlfriend demands that you do something extreme to prove your love, like stop hanging out with your friends, or throw out all of your heavy metal band T-shirts, we call this "toxic codependency" or "coercive manipulation" or "abusive behavior," and it's very bad.

But when Heavenly Father does it, it's called "testing your faith" or "teaching you deeper spiritual concepts" and it's very good.

In the One True Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Heavenly Father tests your faith a lot. This is one way you can know for sure that it's the One True Church. It's the same way that Heavenly Father only destroys everything you love if you're extra close to Him, like Job was, or Ezekiel, or Jesus. Or most of the twelve apostles, who died horrible deaths as martyrs. Or the early Christians who were fed to fucking lions as entertainment.

It's kind of like the way your crazy ex-roommate only chased you around the apartment with a butcher knife screaming, "I'll kill you before I let you leave me!" because the two of you were extra close to each other. Only deep love motivates homicidal sadism.

In His infinite love and wisdom, Heavenly Father created a lot of fun, different ways to test our faith. For example, he might do this by killing your kids, like He did with Job in the Bible, or Joseph and Emma Smith. Or He might do this by telling you to give him all your money, like he did with a bunch of early Mormons when He wanted to build a temple. He sometimes still does this on behalf of big name evangelical preachers, prompting them to demand funds from their congregation for private jets or penthouses that God very much wants them to have. God may also test your faith by commanding you to kill people, like He did with Abraham, for example, or basically everyone who's ever started a Holy War.

Unfortunately for all of us humans, Heavenly Father very seldom makes personal appearances these days to test our faith. He did it for centuries, which is probably why He burned out on it. Everything gets tedious if you do it too much.

So he delegated the job of testing our faith to His One True Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Being the One True Church of course means that they are just as good at testing the faith of the faithful as God is. Though they've put their own spin on it a little.

One of the unique ways that The Church tests the faith of Heavenly Father's Chosen Latter-day Saints is by telling them one thing is Absolute Truth, direct from God, and then later telling them something that contradicts that first thing, and then telling them that they never said that first thing was Absolute Truth to begin with.

For example, the leaders of The Church might say for, like, sixty years, "Heavenly Father commands all His most righteous male followers to have many, many wives, and no, there isn't a way around this, if you aren't a polygamist, you are in big trouble and Heavenly Father will be super mad."

And then one day, possibly around the year 1890, the leaders of The Church might say something along the lines of, "Hey, so, turns out the United States won't let Utah become a state unless we don't do polygamy, so Heavenly Father says we need to stop doing polygamy."

And then when Mormons say, "Hey, wait, we thought we HAD to do the polygamy thing or we were breaking Heavenly Father's commandments," the leaders of The Church might say something along the lines of, "Hey, we never said you had to do polygamy to follow God's commandments, you are definitely remembering that wrong."

This might SEEM like it is a straightforward case of The Church Getting Shit Wrong And Then Trying To Clean Up The Mess. But in reality, it's just a really inspiring Test Of Your Faith. The way you pass the test is by saying, "Oh, okay, you're right, I'm absolutely remembering that wrong, my bad."

Because the answer is NEVER that The One True Church got it wrong. The One True Church CANNOT get it wrong. If it got shit that wrong, it could not be The One True Church.

Let's say you are in a romantic relationship. You share an apartment with your partner. It feels like love, though it might also just be severe chronic gas.

One day, you find out that your college friend Nina is going to be in your area. She normally lives thousands of miles away, and it's been at least a decade since you've seen her in person. You're really excited to catch up with her, plus work has been really stressful lately and you could use some time unplugged from real life.

"She'll be in town on Saturday," you tell your partner. "I know it's our normal date night, but I haven't seen her in years, and I'd just love to grab some dinner with her and maybe go to a concert."

"Sure!" your partner says. "Have a great time. We have plenty of Saturdays together, of course you need to spend time with Nina, I've got this book I wanted to read anyway."

Then Saturday arrives, and as you're getting dressed to take Nina to dinner your partner wanders into the bedroom and frowns. "Where are you going?" they ask.

You are confused, as you were neither drunk nor high when your partner encouraged you to make plans so you're pretty sure you're remembering that conversation accurately. "I'm going out with my college friend, Nina, remember?" you say. "We talked about this. She's in town for a couple of days, we're going to go to dinner and a concert."

"But it's SATURDAY," your partner says, getting that look in their eyes that signals one of those really unpleasant fights. "It's our date night. I can't believe you'd ditch me on date night for someone you haven't even seen in years."

"But you said you were good with it! You said you had a book you were going to read -"

"Oh my God, I can't believe you right now. I would never say that. You KNOW how important our Saturdays are to me!"

And suddenly you have this terrible feeling of vertigo, like you aren't sure whether your thoughts are fully connected to the rest of you and somewhere your early evolutionary brain starts screaming DANGER DANGER DANGER.

If you have never been in a relationship like this, congratulations, you are a very lucky person and should probably go buy a lottery ticket right now. The rest of us should viscerally grasp the scenario I'm describing.

When this sort of thing happens in a romantic relationship, it's called gaslighting, and it's very bad.

When the One True Church does this, it's called "Revealing More of Heavenly Father's Truth," and it's very good.

Throughout my growing up years in rural Utah, my parents inflicted a special kind of torment on me and my five younger siblings on a nightly basis. We had to read a whole chapter of The Book of Mormon out loud together. As a family.

Some of those chapters are LONG. Chapter Five of the Book of Jacob will make you long for death and question every life decision you've ever made before it's over. And because our parents made us alternate reading verses, I couldn't even zone out and think about the book I was hiding under my pillow to read after lights out.

In practical terms, this means that, even without my own independent scripture study, which was significant, I read The Book of Mormon many, many times. There are observant, True Believing Mormons who have read that book fewer times than I have, and I haven't been an active Mormon in decades.

And this is one lesson I learned for sure in those many readings of The Book of Mormon, a lesson that was reinforced by the explanations of my parents and my Sunday School teachers:

When the people in The Book of Mormon were righteous, Heavenly Father turned their skin white.

And when they were wicked, Heavenly Father turned their skin dark.

*

"The Church never taught that," my dad tells me. "The Book of Mormon never taught that."

We're camping together, something I've been looking forward to for months, and to be clear I did NOT start this conversation. When he brought up The Church eleven hours ago, over breakfast, I said, "Hey, you know what? I'm happy it means so much to you. It doesn't mean the same thing to me, and I don't think we need to get into it."

It would have been less provocative to wave a crimson banner in front of a feral bull on steroids. There is nothing my father loves talking about more than whatever it is you don't want to get into. Extra points if the thing you don't want to get into is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

At several points in our so far eleven-hour conversation, which lasted through breakfast, a seven-mile hike, lunch, a wade in a lake, and dinner, I said something along the lines of, "You know what? There's no reason we need to keep plowing through this. I'm never going to feel the same way you do about The Church, and I'm okay with that. Why don't we talk about things we both enjoy? Because this conversation isn't going to go the way you want it to."

Which my father, who is in his mid-seventies and could outlast most 25-year-olds at any mental or physical endeavor, received like a syringe full of methamphetamine.

The reason we didn't get into The Book of Mormon and racism before now is because I've been pulling my punches. I'm not trying to destroy his faith - not that I could. I'm pretty sure that shit is made of titanium. But The Church means a lot to him, and I try not to shit all over things that mean a lot to people I love, regardless of my opinion of those things.

But he really wants to address all of my issues with The Church, and he's like a German Shepherd with a bone. He's not letting it go.

So I stopped pulling my punches. "The Book of Mormon is, like, hugely racist," I said. "Racist to an almost breathtaking extent. What is that bullshit with God turning the Lamanites' skin dark when they were wicked? What the hell with that?"

Which brings us to the point where my dad says, "The Book of Mormon never taught that."

I just blink at him. We both were there through the entirety of my childhood, or at least I'm pretty sure we were. I am also confident that I did not hallucinate the lessons about skin color and sin. I have distinct memories of reading this in The Book of Mormon and even more distinct memories of having the theology explained to me.

"The hell you say," I finally manage. "Dad, I remember it. It happens, like, a bunch of times, more than once."

"The Book of Mormon does not say that their skin color was changed," Dad insists. "Heavenly Father changed the appearance of the Lamanites to make them less attractive so that the righteous Nephites wouldn't want to marry them."

"Right," I say. "By changing their skin color, according to the actual Book of Mormon."

"No." Dad seems confident on this point. "No, he just made them less attractive."

"What do you mean, less attractive? You mean, like, Heavenly Father gave them weird teeth or the Hapsburg chin or something? Come on. There's no way you're sticking to this story." I'm feeling a little disoriented at this point. At the same time, my father is strangely incapable of lying. I've never known him to do it successfully. Which means he BELIEVES this.

"Yeah, sure, why not?" he says. "There are lots of ways to make people less attractive."

I do not have a copy of The Book of Mormon with me, and we're camping, so forget cell service. I can't push back on the text of the actual book at the moment, so I shift tactics.

"If that's the explanation," I say, "then maybe fill me in on why The Church didn't grant the Priesthood to Black men or temple endowments to any Black people until 1978. Because if the official theological position of the LDS Church has always been that skin color and sin are completely unrelated, it kinda feels like they wouldn't have waited until fourteen years AFTER the Civil Rights Act was passed to get with the program."

Dad shakes his head, as if the questions I'm asking are so simple and clueless that they pain him. "Heavenly Father was PROTECTING African Americans," he says. "He knew that the wickedness of racism in society would mean they were subjected to persecution if they were given Priesthood powers, so He withheld them until society was ready."

"Oh, so Heavenly Father was all about accommodating the RACISTS? He didn't want to make white RACISTS upset? That's why?"

"Heavenly Father was all about protecting His children," Dad says. "All of his children. The Church has never connected sin with skin color. Never."

After coming home from the camping trip, I realized that I needed a copy of The Book of Mormon that was printed in or before 1978.

One of the best ways the One True Church tests your faith has to do with The Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith called The Book of Mormon "the most correct of any book on earth," which included the Bible, and honestly, you just kind of have to admire the balls of a guy who would say something like that about HIS OWN BOOK.

Because it's the most correct of any book on earth, it is ALREADY PERFECT. This means it has never, ever been changed. Oh, sure, there was the occasional typo in a printing, or a grammatical clarification that needed to be made - through revelation, of course - but none of the MEANINGS of ANYTHING have been changed, not ever.

I mean, factually speaking, when it was first presented to the printer, The Book of Mormon was basically one long, run-on sentence with zero punctuation and rife with grammatical errors, but we can blame the scribes for getting that wrong. Stupid scribes. Didn't they even know to throw a semicolon in there occasionally? And of course Joseph Smith wouldn't have dictated directly from the divine translation of The Book of Mormon something as 19th-century colloquial as "I was a-going thither," or "in them days," which is what those idiot scribes wrote down.

So after that first 1830 printing of The Book of Mormon, there were a few things that just needed to be a little cleaned up. About 4,000 of them, which isn't that many, if you think about it. Like, 4,000 seconds sounds like a lot, but then when you do the math you realize it's only, like, an hour, which isn't long at all.

But Joseph Smith died in 1844, and there have been three major revised editions of The Book of Mormon since he kicked it. It was the most correct of any book on earth back before Joseph Smith revised it four times and the people after him revised it three times, and it's still being corrected, so you can just imagine how correct it is now.

I was pretty sure that after The Church changed its stance on Black men receiving the Priesthood in 1978, a few "clarifications" likely happened with the text of The Book of Mormon. I wanted an unclarified version, the edition of The Book of Mormon I grew up with, to prove to myself that I was not insane.

Lucky for me EBay exists, and more than one person was looking to offload a stray Book of Mormon from the 1970s. Six days after the camping trip, I was in possession of a 1978 edition of The Book of Mormon.

I didn't have to look far to find what I was looking for. Second Nephi, the second book in The Book of Mormon, chapter five, starting with verse 21 spelled it out pretty clearly:

21. And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceeding fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.

22. And thus saith the Lord God: I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities.

23. And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it, and it was done.

This was not the only time this happened in The Book of Mormon. The Lord God was so busy changing people's skin color based on wickedness or righteousness in the ancient Americas that it's a miracle He could keep tabs on His Bible storyline in the Middle East at all.

"I am not insane," I said out loud to my husband after locating these passages.

"We-ell," he said, drawing the word out and tilting his head to one side.

"I mean, about my memories of The Book of Mormon."

"Oh, yeah," he agreed. "I never thought you were insane about that."

You guys.

This is one of the LESS nasty and offensive quotes about race from a Mormon prophet. I straight up will not put some of the stuff said by Brigham Young or Spencer W. Kimball here - it’s too vile.

It wasn't just The Book of Mormon, of course, although "the most correct of any book on earth" definitely wasn't sneaky about its racism. Decades of Church leaders preached against interracial relationships. Prophet Ezra Taft Benson, a member of the KKK-light organization the John Birch Society, wrote a whole-ass book about how dangerous the Civil Rights Movement was to white Americans. Brigham Young, second Prophet of the Church, said some racist shit so vile I won't even copy and paste it here.

Mormon President and Prophet Joseph Fielding Smith saw Brigham Young's bet on race and went all in, explaining that racial identities in our mortal existence were assigned based on how valiant we were in our pre-mortal existence.

“There is a reason why one man is born black and with other disadvantages, while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we once had an estate before we came here, and were obedient; more or less, to the laws that were given us there. Those who were faithful in all things there received greater blessings here, and those who were not faithful received less” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation 1:61).

Throughout all these decades during which The Book of Mormon was teaching racial transfiguration based on moral character, and the Mormon Prophets were warning of the dangers of Civil Rights and racial equity and interracial marriage, during the first century and a half of the existence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in which formal Church statements, scriptures, policies, and publications not only codified but deified the subjugation of Black people, what we apparently didn't know was that this was just Heavenly Father, through the One True Church, setting up one of His very special tests of our faith. It was so special that it took nearly 150 years to set up.

The 1981 version of The Book of Mormon changes the word "white" in the earlier excerpt of Second Nephi to the word "pure." I'm not sure how, exactly, this fixes things, but that's probably because I'm just not spiritual enough.

*

The Catholic Church was on the wrong side of a significant chunk of history. The Crusades, for example, were not endeavors that aged well. There was also the little matter of the Spanish Inquisition, and burning Protestants at the stake, and accusing thousands of women of being witches and then burning them, too.

But one of the more embarrassing things the Catholics were on the wrong side of was the whole situation with Galileo.

Back in the olden days, when Galileo was alive, the Catholic Church taught that the sun orbited the earth. This was a very logical conclusion: since God had come to our particular terrestrial ball in human form as Jesus, clearly God saw earth as the center of the universe and everything else was made to move around earth. It's like that one guy at your company who is somehow, inexplicably, a vice president, despite your reasonable certainty that he's at serious risk of drowning in his own saliva, is pretty sure the entire company revolves around him.

Like I said, you couldn't fault the logic of the Catholics. Except Galileo DID fault their logic. He built a fancy telescope and did math things, and then he said, "Guys, I think we goofed. Math and geometry and calculus and astronomy or whatever are all saying that the earth goes around the sun."

The Catholic Church was having none of this. "Absolutely not. We are the center of God's creation. Because faith."

Galileo probably scratched his head, finally understanding for the first time why things like toilets and antibiotics hadn't been invented yet, given that these jokers were in charge of everything. "Look, I hear what you're saying," he probably said, "and yay faith, I'm totally for that, but I've double checked and I'm telling you, the earth goes around the sun."

"Well," a cardinal or priest or somebody said, "that makes you a heretic."

And they put Galileo on trial, convicted him, and sentenced him to live out the rest of his days under house arrest. For a guy who mostly wanted to stay home and stare at the sky anyway, he probably was okay with this.

I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to say that the intervening years have demonstrated that Galileo was, in fact, correct, and the earth does orbit the sun, however much we might somehow wish it would break free of its axis and go hurtling into space, killing all of us instantaneously.

Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633. It took the Catholic Church until 1992 to admit they got that wrong, apologize, and pardon Galileo posthumously.

Yeah, it's fucked that it took them nearly 360 years to admit they were outrageously wrong and apologize. But at least they did it.

The LDS Church leadership has never apologized for withholding the Priesthood from Black people until 1978. It's never apologized for the racist teachings of the divinely inspired prophets, or the advocacy in opposition to civil rights. And I don't think it ever will, not in another 360 years (assuming the earth doesn't break free of its axis and go mercifully spinning off into space, killing all of us instantaneously).

Because when the Fake Church apologizes for being publicly and indisputably wrong and on the wrong side of history, it's very good, because Fake Churches need to be exposed for being Fake Churches, and they should be sorry.

But the One True Church can't be wrong, and apologizing for doing something would mean that The Church had been wrong about something, so if the One True Church apologizes, it's very bad.

All of this brings me to a confession: I have been tested, I have been measured, and Heavenly Father has found me wanting.

When I found all of those racist quotes from earlier Church leaders, and read stuff about God changing people's skin color based on sin in The Book of Mormon, this was clearly just Heavenly Father testing my faith. I know this because current Mormon President and BFF of Heavenly Father, Russell M. Nelson, one time said, “The Creator of us all calls on each of us to abandon attitudes of prejudice against any group of God’s children. Any of us who has prejudice toward another race needs to repent!” Also a lot of other Church leaders have said a lot of things about the Church never having been racist, ever.

Obviously, this means that my Dad is right and there was never any racism in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nobody in Church leadership ever, ever said anything about race being a punishment for sin, or at least they never said anything that should count as them having said it. The ban on Black men having the Priesthood was completely unrelated to racism in the Church, because there was no racism in the Church, and that's how we know.

It's only because I'm bad at faith tests that I think that the Mormon Church meant it when they said a lot of racist things. If my faith were a little more upscale, instead of the generic brand knock-off, I'd probably be able to say things like, "The Church has never connected sin with skin color," like my Dad did.

For the record, I would have failed the Abraham faith test, too. If God was like, "Prove you love me by killing your kid," I would have suggested God get on some decent meds, get into therapy, and work on loving Himself. Then I would have blocked His number and wondered if I had enough evidence for a restraining order.

Because when someone suggests murder, no matter who's suggesting it, my inadequate faith means that I'm always going to think it's very, very bad.